Doctors have treated only three leukemia patients, but the sensational results from a single shot could be one of the most significant advances in cancer research in decades. And it almost never happened.

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The Penn scientists targeted chroniclymphocytic leukemia (CLL), the most common type of the blood disease. It strikes some 15,000 people in the United States, mostly adults, and kills 4,300 every year. Chemotherapy and radiation can hold this form of leukemia at bay for years, but until now the only cure has been a bone marrow transplant. A bone marrow transplant requires a suitable match, works only about half the time, and often brings on severe, life-threatening side effects such as pain and infection.

In the Penn experiment, the researchers removed certain types of white blood cells that the body uses to fight disease from the patients. Using a modified, harmless version of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, they inserted a series of genes into the white blood cells. These were designed to make to cells target and kill the cancer cells. After growing a large batch of the genetically engineered white blood cells, the doctors injected them back into the patients.

In similar past experimental treatments for several types of cancer the re-injected white cells killed a few cancer cells and then died out. But the Penn researchers inserted a gene that made the white blood cells multiply by a thousand fold inside the body. The result, as researcher June put it, is that the white blood cells became “serial killers” relentlessly tracking down and killing the cancer cells in the blood, bone marrow and lymph tissue.

As the white cells killed the cancer cells, the patients experienced the fevers and aches and pains that one would expect when the body is fighting off an infection, but beyond that the side effects have been minimal.

HardYakka writes "A team of researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory have designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection. The researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever."

Now if you think you do have rights, one last assignment for you. Next time you're at the computer, get on the Internet, go to Wikipedia. When you get to Wikipedia, in the search field for Wikipedia, I want you to type in "Japanese Americans 1942" and you'll find out all about your precious ****ing rights, Okay? All right. You know about it. In 1942, there were 110,000 Japanese American citizens in good standing, law-abiding people who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That's all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had: "Right this way" into the internment camps! Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most, their government took them away! And rights aren't rights if someone can take them away. They're privileges. That's all we've ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. You see all, sooner or later. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government does not give a **** about them! The government doesn't care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety. It simply does not give a **** about you! It's interested in its own power. That's the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.

In the spring of 1788 a family setup housekeeping in the small mountain community of Dillsboro N.C. The family name was Alfort and there were rumors that they had descended from royalty. They bought land by the river and built what was then a very nice large southern colonial home. Dr. Alfort opened up an office and pharmacy in a few rooms in the front of the house. The local people were at first really happy that a new doctor had arrived in their community...but very quickly this attitude was about to change.

Two men both who had gone to the new doctor to be treated for gout suddenly died. Both men had been well liked members of the community and the circumstances angered many of the residents. However in a short time the local minister had brokered peace in the community and everything seemed to be fine. However this calm was short lived.

That Fall the young daughter of the minister was found dead in her bed with puncture marks to her throat. The minister's wife swore she had seen a dark form hovering over her daughter and she screamed but it was too late and the child quickly succumb to the attack.

The incident caused a huge outcry in the town and the people of the area started to claim a vampire or a group of vampires was in their midst. For many nights groups of men ventured out and searched but found nothing. However some men claimed to have seen a large black bat-like creature fly over them. A few nights after the sighting a young boy ran down the hill to his grandfather's house and proclaimed that something was up the hill in his house attacking his parents. The grandfather summoned other men and they ran to the house but only found the parents and their two young daughters, who were dead with puncture wounds to their necks. The area was immediately alerted...soldiers were called in and searched the area. By February of 1789 the community had quieted down.

Then one evening screams were heard and when men arrived they witnessed a black form of a human run from the house, run down the hill and into the Alfort house. When the village men went into the house where the screams had come from they found the bodies of a young couple with vicious bite marks to their throats. Almost at once more men came and they were told that the murderer had ran down the hill and into the Alfort house. When the search party got to the Alfort house Dr. Alfort refused to let them in. However as soon as the sheriff arrived they dragged Dr. Alfort outside and tied him to a tree. When the men entered the house they were surprised at what they found. The upstairs bedrooms each had beds but it was clear that no one had slept in them. When the sheriff and search party went downstairs they found three caskets and Mrs. Alfort, who was dressed in black, lying in one of the caskets and very much alive. She hissed and cursed at them as she was pulled from the casket.

Later that night the sheriff and the village minister announced to the crowd assembled outside the Alfort house that the Alforts and their son were vampires. The Alforts were summarily hanged and then placed back inside the house. The house was set on fire and burned to the ground. However the couple's 15 year old son was not found and never seen in the area again. There were no further unusual murders in the area.

Bad news. Remember that uncontacted South American tribe? (Covered here and here.) They’ve gone missing after narco traffickers wiped out the guard post protecting the tribe. Observers fear the worst.

The Brazilian guard post protecting the uncontacted Indians who were filmed from the air earlier this year has been over-run by heavily-armed men, suspected to be drug-traffickers. It has been ransacked and vital equipment destroyed.

Fears are now mounting for the welfare of the Indians after workers from FUNAI (the government’s Indian Affairs Department) found one of the traffickers’ rucksacks with a broken arrow inside. A rapid survey by governme

An AT&T legal staffer inadvertently (and briefly) posted a damning internal document to the FCC's docket for the pending AT&T/T-Mobile merger. The document makes it clear that "AT&T is giving Deutsche Telekom $39 billion primarily to reduce market competition" and that the company's claims of bigger network buildouts and increased employment are utterly fictional.

Again, the reality appears to be that AT&T is giving Deutsche Telekom $39 billion primarily to reduce market competition. That price tag eliminates T-Mobile entirely -- and makes Sprint (and by proxy new LTE partner LightSquared and current partner Clearwire) more susceptible to failure in the face of 80% AT&T/Verizon market domination. How much do you think wireless broadband market dominance is worth to AT&T over the next decade? After all, AT&T will be first to tell you there's a wireless data "tsunami" coming, with AT&T and Verizon on the shore eagerly billing users up to $10 per gigabyte.

Regardless of the motivation behind rejecting 97% LTE deployment, the letter proves AT&T's claim they need T-Mobile to improve LTE coverage from 80-97% simply isn't true. That's a huge problem for AT&T, since nearly every politician and non-profit that has voiced support for the merger did so based largely on this buildout promise. It's also a problem when it comes to the DOJ review, since proof that AT&T could complete their LTE build for far less than the cost of this deal means the deal doesn't meet the DOJ's standard for merger-specific benefits.

The Chinese media has reported on an extraordinary account of a mother bear saving her cub from a life of torture by strangling it and then killing itself. The bears were kept in a farm located in a remote area in the North-West of China. The bears on the farm had their gall bladders milked daily for ‘bear bile,’ which is used as a remedy in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

It was reported that the bears are kept in tiny cages known as ‘crush cages’, as the bears have no room to manoeuvre and are literally crushed. The bile is harvested by making a permanent hole or fistula in the bears’ abdomen and gall bladder.

As the hole is never closed, the animals are suspect to various infections and diseases including tumours, cancers and death from peritonitis. The bears are fitted with an iron vest, as they often try to kill themselves by hitting their stomach as they are unable to bear the pain.A person who was on the farm in place of a friend witnessed the procedures and told Reminbao.com that they were inhumane.

The witness also claimed that a mother bear broke out its cage when it heard its cub howl in fear before a worker punctured its stomach to milk the bile.

A frightening foreign military intelligence directorate (GRU) report circulating in the Kremlin states that over the past nearly 48 hours the vast intercontinental military tunnel complex constructed by the United States Air force over the past nearly 45 years was hit with two powerful nuclear explosions at its main terminuses in Colorado and Virginia used nearly exclusively by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

As food prices continue to rise we could see a lot more riots, says Yaneer Bar-Yam

You have found a link between speculators and social unrest. How did you discover this?

We started by analysing the recent financial crisis. The crash in US house prices in 2007 was followed by a stock market crash, then a puzzling peak in the price of commodities such as wheat and metals. Why? Money from the mortgage markets had been moved to the commodity markets. When you pour a lot of money into a small market you are going to have peaks. This has nothing to do with supply and demand; it is simply due to speculators. With high food prices, we were not surprised that riots occurred in many parts of the developing world at the same time.

But it's not just speculators causing food prices to rise, is it?

There is another factor: the conversion of corn to ethanol for biofuel in the US. Forty per cent of US corn is now being converted to ethanol. That's over 15 per cent of global production from almost nothing 10 years ago. This has been a very large shock to the agricultural system.

When you plot food prices over the last 10 years, you see sharp peaks superimposed on a rising trend. The peaks are due to speculation and the rising trend due to corn-to-ethanol conversion.

Before you take another probiotic cap, you may want to read this. Yet another study at McMaster University in Canada suggests that gut bacteria might be able to alter your brain chemistry and change your mood and behavior, reports Science NOW.

We reported on earlier research on gut bacteria at McMaster University and at Ohio State University. We also mentioned some heady speculations at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center on a new field of microbial endocrinology, “where microbiology meets neuroscience.”

In the new study, McMaster researchers take a slightly bolder step. They fed mice a broth containing a “benign” bacterium, Lactobacillus rhamnosus. The scientists chose this partly because, well, they had some around, so why not, and also because related Lactobacillus bacteria are a major ingredient of probiotic supplements and very little is known about their potential side effects.

How it works, maybe

They found that mice whose diets were supplemented with L. rhamnosus for 6 weeks exhibited fewer signs of stress and anxiety in standard lab tests, as reported online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For example, the mice spent more time exploring narrow elevated walkways and wide-open spaces, which are scary to rodents. (That might explain the Jackass movies?)

But how does it work? That’s the part that has been puzzling me. First, the McMaster researchers found changes in the activity of genes in the brain that encode portions of the receptor for the neurotransmiter GABA. GABA typically dampens neural activity, and many drugs for treating anxiety disorders target its receptors. (The Texas Tech guys also suggested GABA effects.)

Then they cut the vegas nerve, which runs between the stomach and brain, and lo and behold, the effects stopped. The findings “open up very exciting speculations” about using probiotics to treat mood disorders in people, says Emeran Mayer, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. But he said he’s skeptical that the findings will translate easily from mice to people.

jet-jets-private-plane-planes-planes-fly-rich-wealthy-charterVia Who Rules America?, a financial manager provides his perspective on the wealthiest one percent and 0.1 percent of Americans — i.e. his clients — regarding who they are, how they got so rich, and why he worries that they have too much power:

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Membership in this elite group is likely to come from being involved in some aspect of the financial services or banking industry, real estate development involved with those industries, or government contracting.

Recently, I spoke with a younger client who retired from a major investment bank in her early thirties, net worth around $8M. Since I knew she held a critical view of investment banking, I asked if her colleagues talked about or understood how much damage was created in the broader economy from their activities. Her answer was that no one talks about it in public but almost all understood and were unbelievably cynical, hoping to exit the system when they became rich enough.

Folks in the top 0.1% come from many backgrounds but it’s infrequent to meet one whose wealth wasn’t acquired through direct or indirect participation in the financial and banking industries. One of our clients, net worth in the $60M range, built a small company and was acquired with stock from a multi-national. Stock is often called a “paper” asset. Another client, CEO of a medium-cap tech company, retired with a net worth in the $70M range. The bulk of any CEO’s wealth comes from stock, not income, and incomes are also very high. Last year, the average S&P 500 CEO made $9M in all forms of compensation. One client runs a division of a major international investment bank, net worth in the $30M range and most of the profits from his division flow directly or indirectly from the public sector, the taxpayer. Another client with a net worth in the $10M range is the ex-wife of a managing director of a major investment bank, while another was able to amass $12M after taxes by her early thirties from stock options as a high level programmer in a successful IT company. The picture is clear; entry into the top 0.5% and, particularly, the top 0.1% is usually the result of some association with the financial industry and its creations. I find it questionable as to whether the majority in this group actually adds value or simply diverts value from the US economy and business into its pockets and the pockets of the uber-wealthy who hire them. They are, of course, doing nothing illegal.

I think it’s important to emphasize one of the dangers of wealth concentration: irresponsibility about the wider economic consequences of their actions by those at the top. Wall Street created the investment products that produced gross economic imbalances and the 2008 credit crisis. It wasn’t the hard-working 99.5%. Average people could only destroy themselves financially, not the economic system. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the collapse was primarily due to the failure of complex mortgage derivatives, CDS credit swaps, cheap Fed money, lax regulation, compromised ratings agencies, government involvement in the mortgage market, the end of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, and insufficient bank capital. Only Wall Street could put the economy at risk and it had an excellent reason to do so: profit. It made huge profits in the build-up to the credit crisis and huge profits when it sold itself as “too big to fail” and received massive government and Federal Reserve bailouts. Most of the serious economic damage the U.S. is struggling with today was done by the top 0.1% and they benefited greatly from it.

Not surprisingly, Wall Street and the top of corporate America are doing extremely well as of June 2011. For example, in Q1 of 2011, America’s top corporations reported 31% profit growth and a 31% reduction in taxes, the latter due to profit outsourcing to low tax rate countries. Somewhere around 40% of the profits in the S&P 500 come from overseas and stay overseas, with about half of these 500 top corporations having their headquarters in tax havens. If the corporations don’t repatriate their profits, they pay no U.S. taxes. The year 2010 was a record year for compensation on Wall Street, while corporate CEO compensation rose by over 30%, most Americans struggled. In 2010 a dozen major companies, including GE, Verizon, Boeing, Wells Fargo, and Fed Ex paid US tax rates between -0.7% and -9.2%. Production, employment, profits, and taxes have all been outsourced. Major U.S. corporations are currently lobbying to have another “tax-repatriation” window like that in 2004 where they can bring back corporate profits at a 5.25% tax rate versus the usual 35% US corporate tax rate. Ordinary working citizens with the lowest incomes are taxed at 10%.

I could go on and on, but the bottom line is this: A highly complex and largely discrete set of laws and exemptions from laws has been put in place by those in the uppermost reaches of the U.S. financial system. It allows them to protect and increase their wealth and significantly affect the U.S. political and legislative processes. They have real power and real wealth. Ordinary citizens in the bottom 99.9% are largely not aware of these systems, do not understand how they work, are unlikely to participate in them, and have little likelihood of entering the top 0.5%, much less the top 0.1%. Moreover, those at the very top have no incentive whatsoever for revealing or changing the rules. I am not optimistic.

“...That wind power could reach these lows versus natural gas was unimaginable until recently.”
- EPE president and chief executive Mauricio Tolmasquim

Wind power in Brazil now costs less than natural gas. Brazil’s National Electric Power Agency held a series of energy auctions last week. During the auctions, 78 wind power projects, out of 92 projects, nabbed contracts.

EPE predicts Brazil’s wind power potential of 143 gigawatts (GW) could increase to 300 GW with better use of turbine technology. EPE also predicts that the Brazilian use of wind power will increase to 60 percent between 2010 and 2020.

Time Warner, gigantic media conglomerate and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the Guy Fawkes mask design from the 2006 Warner Brothers film “V for Vendetta.” So, every time you purchase one of those masks, they are paid a licensing fee. Nick Bilton in the New York Times has more.

Professor Kurtis Heimerl of the University of California, Berkeley has created a do-it-yourself GSM (global system for mobile communications, a worldwide cell-phone standard) cellular data network for areas (such as remote villages) with limited power and network resources, reports Shareable.

The network can be deployed off-the-grid because only low power is required, using solar or wind, and no connection to a cell-phone company is required.

What if devices like this were used to connect to an autonomous Internet through a collectively owned satellite? For example, Buy This Satellite is an effort to crowdfund enough money to purchase the communications satellite TerreStar-1. Non-profit Ahumanright aims to use the satellite to provide free Internet access in the developing world.

It's fair to say we nearly lost one of our team a couple of days ago. Gizmag feature writer and videographer Loz Blain was out test riding the amazing BMW S1000RR superbike with a friend on board when he survived an extraordinarily close call with an oncoming 4WD that had drifted onto the wrong side of the road. As he was filming for a video review, he had a high-definition camera on board to record the incident, so without further ado here's the footage - and a reminder that not all single vehicle accidents are the rider's fault.